As her stage name suggests, Betty Who is a shape-shifting character study.

The 22-year-old Australian born Jessica Newham today crafts danceable, new wave-tinged pop
bubbling with every coo and synthesizer riff — the throwback result an effervescent hybrid of Katy
Perry and early Madonna.

Who, however, began playing classical cello at age 4 and departed from Down Under at 16 to study
at the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.

Songwriting studies followed at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where the performer harbored
ambitions of becoming a diarylike acoustic artist in the vein of Sara Bareilles.

Such a mellow mold couldn’t last.

“I wanted to dance,” she said. “I was always a little too much of a showoff. My friends saw my
desperate need to always move.”

Betty Who — the moniker borrowed a tune from her teenage days, “when I thought it was very cool
naming songs randomly without any nod to the lyrics” — was born.

In 2011, Berklee peer and writer-producer Peter Thomas (Selena Gomez, Victoria Justice) helped
the budding bleach-blond soloist usher in a far different sound. Who noted that the “shock value”
of a dance-pop makeover drew favorable reaction among her fine-arts friends.

“It started to get more and more attention,” Who said.

She formed a three-piece backing band with former classmates and began performing gigs around
New York — and, perhaps more important, promoting her music online to catch the ears of music
bloggers.

Who’s star rose unexpectedly in September when a YouTube video set to her single
Somebody Loves You went viral. In the clip, Salt Lake City resident Spencer Stout staged a
flash-mob-style choreographed group dance inside a Home Depot store as a marriage proposal to his
partner.

“The EP wasn’t even on iTunes; we had to scramble,” said Who, set to kick off her first North
American tour on Tuesday in Rumba Cafe. “It blew up so intensely and with more power than any of us
could have hoped for.”

A week after the video logged several million hits, she signed with RCA Records. A follow-up EP
to Who’s independently released
The Movement debut is due out in the spring. An album could follow in the fall.

Some major-label perks are a far cry from her self-reliant past. A personal stylist, for one,
recently “showed up at my hotel room with, like, eight packed racks of clothing.”

“I am conscious of how much more pressure is on me. You get thrown into performing, and you have
to learn really quickly,” she said. “But I think that makes me work harder and produce things that
are better than they were before.”

Although her first musical loves were commercial pop icons N’Sync, Christina Aguilera and
Britney Spears — “whatever the radio told me” — Betty Who might be more closely aligned with Robyn,
the Swedish singer who morphed from bubblegum teen starlet into a left-of-center darling (with
indie cred and critical buzz to match).

Still, she added: “I do like to write in a way that’s ambiguous enough so that anybody could
listen to one of those songs and say: ‘Oh, my God, that exact same thing happened to me. How did
she know?’”